Jennifer Holland

Jennifer wears lot of hats at Congo Emissions Management since joining as Program Manager in early 2019. Traveling frequently between her home in Vancouver and the field site in Isangi, she manages the operations, monitoring and program development for the Isangi REDD+ project, as well as spearheading the project’s re-verification to Verified Carbon (VCS) and Climate Community and Biodiversity (CCB) Standards.

This work is an extension of a lifelong dedication to ensuring forest conservation projects are designed collaboratively with the local communities they affect - empowering them to be their own agents of sustainable change. She cut her teeth with Ecosystem Restoration Associates, helping usher the first two applications of carbon finance methodologies for protecting Canadian forests through CCB verification. After that, Jennifer went on to serve as the in-situ Director of Operations for Wildlife Works’ landmark Mai Ndombe REDD+ project in the DRC for three years. Leading that project through the ground-breaking CCB and VCS validation and verification as DRC’s first mega-project. Here, her efforts dramatically increased operational effectiveness as well as increasing the transparency of benefit distribution.

Working with stakeholders at every level, her efforts routinely go beyond establishing Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. She has initiated Local Development Committees to develop and set the priorities of local projects and benefit distributions – including agricultural programs, increased access to vital medical supplies, vaccinations, and educational materials.

When she is not ensuring REDD+ projects live up to their transformative potential, she enjoys hiking with her Congolese dogs and messy papier-mache projects with her young son.